As the term is used herein, “integrated circuit” includes devices such as those formed on monolithic semiconducting substrates, such as those formed of group IV materials like silicon or germanium, or group III–V compounds like gallium arsenide, or mixtures of such materials. The term includes all types of devices formed, such as memory and logic, and all designs of such devices, such as MOS and bipolar. The term also comprehends applications such as flat panel displays, solar cells, and charge coupled devices.
Currently, customized integrated circuits require their own specially configured test hardware. This tends to dramatically increase the cost of the hardware required to test the customized integrated circuits, and also dramatically increases the engineering effort and the cycle time required to accomplished the testing. Even for design families of integrated circuits that use the same package, customized testing hardware is still needed, because each integrated circuit design in the same family has its own configurations in terms of power segment usage, IO buffer type, power level of each power segment, IP usage, and other resource usage.
What is needed, therefore, is a system by which problems such as those described above are overcome, at least in part.